It is worth wondering if the Russians would have felt able to restart work on the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) on the Iranian Gulf coast at Bushehr if it had not been for the release last week of the US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that Tehran’s nuclear weapons’ program had ceased in 2003. Moscow has been resolutely opposed to the Bush administration’s belligerent approach to the Iranians. While Washington sought to ratchet up the tension with sanctions underpinned by an implicit threat of a US assault on Iran, Russia, with fellow permanent Security Council member China, protested that only negotiations would work. Unfortunately this view was undermined by Tehran’s refusal to permit the full range of IAEA inspections it is treaty-bound to accommodate. The Iranians still haven’t shifted ground on this key reasonable demand. However, because the US intelligence community now admits its earlier belief in an imminent Iranian atomic bomb, Bush can no longer saber-rattle convincingly. More usefully from Moscow’s point of view, is that it can now press ahead and complete the $1-billion Bushehr project.
Officially work had come to a stop because the Iranians were behind with payments. Now one doubted, however, that it was political concerns that held up the work. Moscow was almost certainly not responding to any request from the White House but acting on the basis of its own intelligence assessments.
The change of heart undoubtedly has something to do with the warm relations that have sprung up between the two countries with each president visiting the other twice in the last two years. The Iranians say trade has doubled this year alone, with the balance strongly in Russia’s favor. Moscow, however, is not particularly interested in making money out of Iran nor can it be blind to the potential danger of having a nuclear power on its southern doorstep.
The fact it is therefore going ahead with the Bushehr project and has confirmed it will be supplying the two reactors with nuclear fuel, indicates the Russians know something the Americans don’t — or don’t want to know. Full details of the resumed project will, say the Russians, be announced at the end of this month. The delay in a full declaration may be significant. The final announcement may include further information on the “security arrangement” over the nuclear fuel, which forms part of the new deal. It might be that the Russians will collect spent fuel rods from Bushehr and take them back for reprocessing, thus keeping control of fissile material that might otherwise be used in a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons program. They may even have their own physical monitoring presence at the site.
It is worth wondering what else might come out of the detailed year-end announcement. Has Moscow perhaps persuaded President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as part of the resumption of the Bushehr work to open Iran’s nuclear doors fully to IAEA inspection? If so this would be a major diplomatic coup for Moscow, as well as, in its way a triumph for Iran. It would certainly spoil the Bush Christmas dinner.
